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How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users' goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.
From the Back Cover
How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users' goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.
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Customer Reviews
It's easy to read, well laid out and illustrated.
I keep coming back to this book, and have loaned it out to good effect. Persona-enhanced development is starting to happen in my organisation!
User-driven design means that you focus on what the user needs in a system instead of designing features because they're "cool". Personas are imaginary users of your system that you keep in mind while designing how the application will work. But it's much more than just picking a name like Bob and then coding away...
This book goes into the process of interviewing the user base of your proposed application, determining the needs and abilities of that base. A system that is to be used by computer-savvy accountants will not have the same look and feel as a system that is intended for your grandmother. By conducting these interviews and consolidating the results, the designer can get a good idea as to what a typical user will look like. That information is then used to create a number of personas, or fictitious people who will be the target audience. These personas come complete with names, pictures, and a background. Then instead of building features based on how you feel about them, you look at the feature through the eyes of "Bob", based on his attitudes, experience, and personality. It's like having a user available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The User Is Always Right takes you through the steps necessary to understand the audience for your system, as well as how to make that audience "real" in terms of individual people. The authors do a nice job in making the process clear and understandable, and by the end you can start building your imaginary friends with confidence. The process outlined here is one that you wouldn't necessarily use for every project, as you could spend days gathering and distilling the data you collect. But the concepts they present, once understood, will allow you to build your "Bob"s even with small systems. Then armed with that knowledge, you can anticipate answers to the question "what would Bob do?"
So... If you are tired of designing really cool systems (to you) that don't ever seem to get used, it may be because you missed the real users. Give the persona technique a try, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how it affects your development.
Besides, how else could you actually be commended for inviting and talking to imaginary friends?
What I liked:
- the insights this book gives you are instantly actionable, it is really a step-by-step guide
- the authors discuss the topics that are relevant to persona creation (and take it literally, there is great information on survey design, how to segment results, what sources to use to find a photo for your persona, etc.)
- you will find good real world examples
- the book shows multiple approaches based on different needs and constraints
- the copywriting is also outstanding, no nonsense and easy to digest
What I didn't like:
I am trying hard but really can't think of anything :)
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